From ClimateREALISM

By Linnea Lueken

National Public Radio (NPR) recently published a largely pictorial article, titled “Meet 5 women documenting the effects of climate change around the world,” composed of photographs taken by women that supposedly, “highlight climate change.” In reality, what these women covered in dramatic photographs are the impacts of civil strife, government corruption, and natural weather events, on communities, not harms human caused climate change.

The article suggests that extreme weather is worsening globally, impacting different communities in different tragic ways. Even the International Panel on Climate Change disagrees with this fundamental point, and a comprehensive analysis of the IPCC data on extreme weather by the Global Warming Policy Foundation’s Ralph Alexander, Ph.D., concludes that “Careful examination of the actual data reveals that if there is any trend in weather extremes, it is downward rather than upward.”

Data show that climate related deaths are way down worldwide in recent decades compared to the past, shown in the image below.

One of the highlighted regions, Somalia, is described in the NPR piece as “one of the places that has contributed the least to global carbon dioxide emissions, and yet its environment is among the most severely impacted, in irreversible ways.”

Somalia suffers from severe flooding during their monsoon season, called “Gu rains.” These periods of flooding are essential to agriculture in the region, as it is otherwise mostly arid. Like in California, fluctuations between drought and monsoon have historically been regular part of Somalia’s climate, possibly due to an oscillating system in the Indian Ocean called the Indian Ocean Dipole which is similar to the Pacific’s El Niño. As population centers in Somalia grow into low-lying areas, previously used for monsoon dependent agriculture, they are more susceptible to encountering floods resulting from periodic, seasonal Gu rains.

Somalia is plagued not so much by climate change but rather by violence and government corruption, leading to destroyed or delayed vital infrastructure and poorly managed aid resources. Civil war has been raging in Somalia since 1991. This was covered by NPR in the past in this article, describing the once-beautiful city of Mogadishu which is now in chaos and ruin.

The United Nations says that places like South Sudan also suffer famine primarily because of human violence and war in the region, stating in a BBC report that “The main cause of the famine is conflict.”

East Africa recently suffered from locust swarms, as shown in the NPR photos, which hatched out in largely unpopulated parts of the region. As described in this report, due to poor coordination between nations and green-agenda driven lack of pesticides, locusts swarmed and devoured unprotected crops before they could be sprayed and killed. Locusts are not unprecedented in Africa, and are certainly not due to climate change. In fact, their hatch rates may be tied to that same Indian Ocean Dipole event that serves as a driver for the Gu rains in Somalia.

The NPR piece also showcases West African coasts as suffering from coastal erosion and flooding, which they say is caused by accelerating sea level rise. As covered in Climate Realism here, and in this Heartland Institute analysis here, it is clear that coastlines grow and shrink as a result of natural forces like tectonics or storms, and also due to human development impacting the structural integrity of coastlines. No human-caused warming required.

Regions with major river deltas are likely more susceptible to land subsidence and sea level rise than others, as this study shows, such as the Volta River Delta of Ghana. Major land subsidence and erosion began to occur in Ghana after large dams were built upstream which reduced sediment flow into the delta.

The NPR article also implies Hurricane Maria was a creation of climate change. Hurricanes are entirely natural events and no single hurricane can be attributed to climate change. What the data does show, however, is hurricanes have not been increasing in number or severity as the planet modestly warms, as discussed in these Climate Realism articles here, here, and here.

Taking pictures of people in distress after severe weather events, then attributing their suffering to man-made climate change is uninformed at best, and cruel exploitation at worst. The impact of natural disasters globally can be reduced in developing countries as they have in the developed world through human innovation, adaptation, and economic growth. The harms resulting from war and government corruption have nothing to do with climate change and won’t be solved by cutting carbon dioxide emissions. Directing focus away from the real causes of human struggles in at-risk regions of the world serves no one but the journalists in pursuit of accolades from the like-minded mainstream media for pursuing the progressive political cause of expanding government control to fight supposed climate change.

Linnea Lueken

https://www.heartland.org/about-us/who-we-are/linnea-lueken

Linnea Lueken is a Research Fellow with the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy. While she was an intern with The Heartland Institute in 2018, she co-authored a Heartland Institute Policy Brief “Debunking Four Persistent Myths About Hydraulic Fracturing.”

Any society in which people are fired for not making the medical decision their government wants them to make is an unjust society.

Canadian Juscha Grunther used to be gainfully employed as a homecare worker. On a daily basis, she improved the quality of life of disabled individuals. Today, she’s one of the invisible multitudes – a person who lost her job because she declined to be injected with COVID-19 vaccines.

Juscha appears in the first part of the video above. Concerned about medical apartheid in Canada, she invites like-minded Canadians to lobby politicians to pass legislation banning mandatory vaccination under any circumstances.

discussion of Section 7 of Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms – a screengrab from the website of Canada’s federal Department of Justice (click image)

Bodily autonomy (security of the person) is guaranteed by this country’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms, as well as by other national documents and international human rights declarations. Over the past year, this fundamental right to refuse medical treatment has been determinedly ignored by the powers-that-be.

When everyone from mayors to landlords to medical associations start behaving as though a longstanding human right no longer exists, that’s the big red flag – the signal that things are going off the rails.

In the video, Grunther begins by introducing herself:

My name is Juscha Grunther…for the past year I’ve been struggling to do the painful, hard, right thing in a world which mostly seems to have lost its way. And I’m talking to you from my converted school bus…I lost my home, I lost my job ‘cause I refused to take an injection that was still very experimental, the ingredients of which and the longterm side effects of which are still largely unknown. And I am not willing to be a guinea pig. [bold added]

She continues:

This is a call out to our politicians on [Parliament Hill, in Ottawa] to find their courage…This is also a call out to all Canadians. People who do have guts and grit, and whose capacity for thinking for themselves is still intact.

Like many of us, Juscha feels shell shocked. So much that we collectively professed to cherish has slipped away so quickly:

I never thought I would experience anything like this is my life. These lockdowns, these shutdowns, the isolation, the masking, the dehumanizing, all of it. Our humanity seems to be under attack. Everything that is so beautiful to the human spirit: justice and freedom, beauty of being, smiles, warmth, connection, closeness, hugs, dance and prayer, music and fun. Love. Truth. All this and more seemed to practically vanish in the blink of an eye under the decree of our various health authorities…

Voices such as Juscha’s have been ignored by the mainstream media. But you can see her interviewed here. In that instance, at 3:10 minutes, she declares: “I’d actually rather die fighting, fighting these mandates, than get the vaccine. That’s how strongly I felt about it.”

You don’t have to agree with Juscha. But she is an adult of sound mind who has an inalienable right to make her own medical decisions about her own body.

Any society in which it’s OK to fire people who don’t make the medical decision their government or their employer thinks they should make is an unjust society.

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Having sold their souls not-covering Biden-family corruption, election scandals, Pharmaceutical malfeasance, and rackets running through politics and science, it’s no surprise that barely 1 in 6 Republicans trust most media outlets. Mass lies will do that.

Look at the vast  partisan gulf in the poll below which asked “how trustworthy do you rate the news media…“. Can anyone look at this graph and argue that the media is not dominated by left-leaning views?  Fully 18 of 22 media outlets appeal to, and are trusted by around three times as many left leaning voters.

It’s no surprise that the most polarized and divisive news source in America is CNN followed by The New York Times and Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post. 

The Republicans (red) are more skeptical than Democrats (blue) of nearly every media outlet.

The least polarising of the mainstream news outlets is the Wall Street Journal. 

The only media outlet arguably that serves both political views is The Weather Channel, but even there half of Republicans and 40% of Democrats don’t “trust” it. There is no common Town Square media left where both sides of the political spectrum can hear each others views.

How things have changed since the year 2000

Republicans were always less likely to trust the media than Democrats were, but in the last twenty years that trust has evaporated.

In New Zealand trust fell because people now see the media as an “extension of the government”

Trust in the media is falling in New Zealand too “at an alarming level”. (It’s only alarming if you think the media is worth trusting).

The Daily Examiner in New Zealand seems perplexed that government funding might be a bad thing. Almost like they and the academics at the AUT research centre for Journalism, Media and Democracy, who did the study, have never once thought about the Government as a vested interest.

While in 2020, 62% of New Zealanders trusted the news they consumed, in 2022 the figure was 52%. Additionally, general trust in the news continues to decline.

• • • Paradoxically, one of the main reasons for distrust in news media appears to be the Government’s funding of it. A large number of respondents now perceive media as an extension of the Government, hence it is seen untrustworthy, says Myllylahti.
    • This year, journalists have been increasingly under attack when reporting on the Covid crisis, vaccinations, vaccine mandates, protests and so on. In its role as disseminator of vital information in a crisis, the media has perhaps been seen as the Government mouthpiece. In one sense, it has quite rightly been, says Dr Greg Treadwell, co-author of the report.

Funny how telling the public to obey the government, without any questions or alterative views, makes the media look like a wing of the bureaucrats because that’s exactly what it was.

From the MANHATTAN CONTRARIAN

April 10, 2022/ Francis Menton

What will the production and consumption of energy look like in the United States in 2050? There are two very different answers to that question.

On Side One are those who assert that we face a “climate crisis” that can only be addressed by the rapid forced suppression of the production and use of fossil fuels. Therefore, some combination of government coercion, investor pressure and voluntary institutional action will shortly drive coal, oil and natural gas from the energy marketplace, to be replaced by carbon-free “renewables.” And thus by 2050 we will have achieved the utopia of “net zero” carbon emissions.

Those on Side Two think that the Side One vision is completely unrealistic fantasy. Simple arithmetic shows that without massive energy storage no amount of building of wind and solar generators can make much difference in fossil fuel use for electricity production; and adequate energy storage devices to fill the gap do not even exist as a technical matter, let alone at remotely reasonable cost. Result: no matter what the grandees say, fossil fuel production and use in 2050 will be as high or higher than they are now.

Which Side do you think is right?

At the moment, all of the Great and the Good seem to have planted their flags on Side One. President Biden leaves no doubt as to where he stands. By Press Release of April 22, 2021, Biden committed the U.S. to a “net zero” economy by 2050:

On Day One, President Biden fulfilled his promise to rejoin the Paris Agreement and set a course for the United States to tackle the climate crisis at home and abroad, reaching net zero emissions economy-wide by no later than 2050.

And by various Executive Orders, Biden has the whole federal bureaucracy committed to the fossil fuel suppression project, from stopping drilling to blocking pipelines to decommissioning power plants.

In the investment world, all of the biggest banks and money managers are on board. Here is a link to the “Road to Net Zero” web page of BlackRock, the nation’s largest mutual fund manager. Pithy quote:

We believe that the transition to a net zero world is the shared responsibility of every citizen, corporation, and government. . . . In January 2021, we committed to supporting the goal of net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 or sooner – and announced a number of steps to help our clients navigate the transition.

And it goes without saying that the world of academia has joined Side One with full unanimity. After all, these are the “smartest” people; and the “smartest” people all know that the “climate crisis” can only be solved by suppressing fossil fuels. Here is a representative statement from President Peter Salovey of Yale University, June 24, 2021:

To avoid the most severe outcomes of climate change, experts recommend taking immediate action to reach world-wide carbon net neutrality in the next three decades. Yale will become a net zero carbon emissions campus in less than half of that time.  Along our path to zero actual emission by 2050, we expect to reduce our actual emissions by at least 50 percent below 2005 levels by 2035.

So surely then, with this kind of unanimous agreement from the top, backed by the full force of federal government coercion, fossil fuels will be completely gone by 2050.

Perhaps before getting too confident in that conclusion, we should check in with the Energy Information Administration. The EIA is the part of the federal Department of Energy that provides data and statistics on U.S. energy production and consumption, both historical and projected. Once a year, generally in March, they issue what they call their Annual Energy Outlook, or AEO. AEO2022 just came out on March 3. The opening page of AEO2022 provides a wealth of links that can keep you busy for hours if you have the inclination.

The incredible thing about this AEO is it’s like nobody told them that the fossil fuels are about to be suppressed. Basically, they treat the whole “net zero by 2050” clamor as so much background noise. For example, what is the EIA’s view as to U.S. natural gas consumption from now through 2050? That’s in this chart:

Net zero anyone? Instead, it looks like ongoing slow but steady growth throughout the entire projection period.

How about U.S. crude oil production? Surely that will plummet toward zero well before 2050. Not according to the EIA:

Basically, they predict that U.S. crude production will increase substantially over the next few years, and then level out and remain there through 2050.

To be fair, the two charts above represent what they call their “reference case.” They have other charts that show high production/consumption cases and also low production/consumption cases. However, the high cases are driven by high prices, and the low cases are driven by low prices. There is no effect discernible in the EIA projections resulting from regulatory suppression, let alone from woke investors or the pompous pronouncements of academia.

One of my favorite charts is this one covering projected “light duty vehicle” sales, aka cars.

And you thought that buying anything but a fully-electric vehicle would be illegal by 2030? The EIA’s projection is that even by 2050, fully-electric vehicles will not have achieved 10% of the market, while fully gasoline-powered vehicles will still have a market share around 75%.

Numerous other links on the AEO2022 intro page provide for fascinating reading, essentially contradicting everything about our energy future that is coming out of the White House. For example, there is “EIA projects U.S. energy-related CO2 emissions fall in the near term, then rise.” In other words, the claims of “net zero” emissions by 2050 are so much hot air. Or there’s “Petroleum and natural gas are the most-used fuels in the United States through 2050.”

Read the full post here.